


still to be lost

by outwardbound93



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Future Fic, M/M, Past Secret Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-10
Updated: 2016-02-10
Packaged: 2018-05-19 14:53:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5971042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outwardbound93/pseuds/outwardbound93
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One Direction hasn’t been together in years and years, but Zayn knows as well as Niall does that the band never really ends. They’re all still in it, and of it, like the oak tree grown big and sturdy now in Trisha’s back garden. They were that tree once and they’re its seeds now, or they were. Niall, at least, seems to have grown something beautiful of himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	still to be lost

**Author's Note:**

> title is from joan didion's quote, "the fear is for what is still to be lost." approximately a million years ago an anon dropped the prompt 'things we said when we were on top of the world' into my inbox. idk if you’re still out there, or following me, but here’s that fic. i hope you like it!

“Woke up this morning with

a terrific urge to lie in bed all day

and read. Fought against it for a minute.

Then looked out the window at the rain.

And gave over. Put myself entirely

in the keep of this rainy morning.

Would I live my life over again?

Make the same unforgiveable mistakes?

Yes, given half a chance. Yes.”

\- Raymond Carver, "Rain"

Zayn wakes up the morning of the book launch with a rock sat at the bottom of his gut. He lays in bed and concentrates on all the tidbits of advice his counselor gave him when it came to dealing with fame and social stuff, the heavy onerous weight of a high public profile, and that keeps him busy for about ten minutes. Then he swings his legs over the side of the bed, grabs his dressing gown from the back of the armchair in the corner, and shuffles off to the kitchen to make some tea. The stone in his gut doesn’t lighten, but he’s used to it now. For whatever that’s worth.

He pops a couple of slices of whole wheat bread into the toaster and settles at the barstool with his iPad in front of him, thinking about logging in and seeing what people are saying. Probably it’s all good. He’s never been a bad storyteller and he’s certainly got an interesting story to tell. And Zayn was never the focus of the band when he was in it. That was always Harry, Harry and Louis, and Harry _and_ Louis, so personally Zayn doesn’t think he should be this worked up about it.

Never mind the fact that he still is. He slides his palm across the pale gray granite, which warms slowly under the vaulted skylight letting in dusted filaments of Yorkshire sunlight, and imagines it’s his hand that’s warming it. The electric kettle on the hob hums when the water is hot, so he slides off his barstool and pads over to it.

Right hand reach up and grab a mug from the cabinet, left hand flick the kettle off. One step left, grab a tea bag from the box on the countertop, right hand grab a fag from the crumpled paper box he keeps a secret in the drawer with the matches and the birthday candles. It’s like a dance, like the choreography he used to have to try so hard to memorize. Dancing back then, in the beginning, was so much like singing was. He couldn’t just follow his voice or his feet, he had marching orders to attend to, and four other boys watching him.

Which makes sense, and he had a role to play, and they shaped the person he became, blah blah blah. Mostly Zayn remembers performing “Can’t Stop Movin’” with the other contestants and how he had to gently kick the back of Harry’s leg to get him following stage directions even though Harry _wanted_ to learn and do everything right, and Zayn was just doing it because he felt responsible for the other boys. Maybe all those years were only about getting them all to a point where they didn’t need each other anymore.

Zayn hollows his cheeks around the fag and sucks in a nice, deep lungful of water vapor. He gave up the real cancer sticks a couple of years ago, the day he looked into the mirror and spotted his first gray hair, but he can’t let the habit go. Perrie used to say he was like that guy from X-Files, that he had some kind of oral fixation. Personally Zayn thinks he’d just rather not talk and if he’s smoking, he doesn’t have to.

Nika and Czerny wake up while he’s plucking his toast out of the steaming hot toaster and dropping them on the white ceramic plate he’ll have to wash later. It’s good. Washing up reminds him of home, and his mom’s dish soap and even Safaa as a baby trying to clutch at the bubbles with the oily rainbow sheen with her chubby toddler’s fists, so he likes it. It’s good.

Zayn whistles soft, and both dogs stop trying to jump all over him, their overlong claws snaring a little on his terrycloth dressing gown. “C’mon, lads, I’ll get your food out for you next. You can’t have jelly.”

Zayn puts the plate back on the counter and fills the dogs’ bowls with the fancy Purina dog food his personal assistant picks up with the rest of his groceries at Tesco every other Tuesday. The dogs eat loudly, so Zayn listens to them nosh on breakfast and concentrates on eating his toast, one harrowing bite at a time. By the time he’s done, the e-cig is out of battery, the dogs are ready to play fetch, and he’s got a couple of hours left to kill before the bookstore downtown opens up. Zayn goes to grab a tennis ball from the bin.

Liam always said that nothing beats a nice snapback when it came to avoiding people recognizing him, but Liam also never stuck out the way Zayn did, and people approaching him never made him miserably uncomfortable like it did Zayn and sometimes Niall. He could just imagine some young girl meeting him and going back to her friends and saying, “He was a bit of a dick,” which wouldn’t have been wrong but he was never a very good actor, and anyway, he was only one-fifth of One Direction. So, yeah.

Zayn pulls the brim of his snapback a little further down his face and peers round the corner of the bookshelf like he’s a spy on a mission, which coincidentally was a game he played up until just a couple of years ago. He takes the book off the shelf and studies it in his hand. Heavy, with thick expensive paper and ink that smells just enough like tattoo ink that he clothes his eyes with his nose pressed to the inside seam of the book. It’s not a short read, either. Four hundred pages and all of it in size 10 Centaur, one of Zayn’s favorite fonts.

His eyes catch on the words and they slip into his brain like he’s tripped over a spell. _Me and the boys were always close, but I think that comes from having been so young together. Growing up is a strange thing when you belong so much to other people because you grow entangled, and somewhere down the line you’ve got to untangle yourselves, which is what this book is about, basically._

The words even sound like Niall. Zayn checks left, then right, and then he takes the book toward the till. There’s already a queue lined up: a woman with her kid, an elderly man with a vinyl album tucked under his arm, a punky-looking lad with a scowl on his face and Tolkien’s novels cradled in the crook of his elbow.

Briefly, Zayn considers just tucking the book into the open side of his jacket and dropping a twenty quid note on the bank of registers, and then the idea that someone will see and take pictures and another goddamn article in the Sun will drop with a title like _Former Popstar Zayn Malik Caught Stealing Former Bandmate’s Book From Local Bookstore_ flashes across his mind, so he joins the queue. It goes faster than he first expected.

Zayn takes the book home and sets an alarm on his phone so that he can only read for an hour, and then he has to find something else to do. Go up the road to his studio, or call his mum or his sisters, or check in on the girls; whatever, but he has to do something.

It’s a hard limit to stick to, that one hour. Zayn didn’t realize how much he missed until he starts reading, and then it’s like Niall’s narrating every word inside his head. Some parts hurt worse than he remembers, like when Niall talks about Zayn’s grandad dying and him leaving X-Factor for a couple of days to attend to that. _We all knew he’d go but we weren’t sure he’d come back._ Learning is different from trust, though. They’d all _learned_ that he would come back when he did, and then he’d kept staying on for years, but they could never quite trust it. Maybe there’s something innate to that.

It takes Zayn two weeks to get all the way through the book, and when he’s finished, Niall’s last words ringing in his ear, he just goes back to the first page and reads it again. When it hurts, it hurts good, like every time Niall ever caught him with another bird while he was meant to be with Perrie. _Look here, I love you, but that’s some shit_. It took Zayn a long, long time to realize that he couldn’t just wait for someone to say those words to him. He’d have to identify his own _some shit_ moments. It’s harder than he ever thought it was, and he’s less forgiving than Niall.

In the middle of the summer, when Zayn’s got his girls on holiday to Disney World in Paris, his personal assistant rings him.

“I’m not home,” he starts. “Sorry, I thought I said.”

He can just about hear her roll her eyes. “No, love. I bought the tickets for you, remember? This is about the new tracks. Legal came back and says they’re a lawsuit waiting to happen. Copyright infringement is a serious –”

“Wait, what?”

“Your lyrics are all verses from a book, apparently,” Liz sighs. “The memoir that the Irish one wrote about when you were a kid.”

Zayn stands in stunned silence with two ice creams shaped like Mickey Mouse’s head oozing chocolate between his fingers. Then he shakes himself. “No, yeah, sorry, I’ll –”

“Great, thank you,” says Liz, who has, to be fair, put up with far too much of Zayn’s bullshit in the past. She’s done her part in telling him, Zayn figures. Now her hands are clean. It’s maybe a little bit unkind to think and he regrets it immediately. He makes a mental note that he’s bound to forget to boost her bonus check at the end of the year, and then he goes to take the ice creams to his daughters.

“Your best legal option since you incorporated identifiable selections from a copyrighted work is to seek permission from the copyright owner, in this case a Niall James Horan, with whom I understand you are acquainted?”

Zayn’s hands itch for a cigarette. He can’t reach for one, though, with his hands trapped under his own skinny butt, so he just nods at his lawyer and thinks about laying on his living room floor with his dogs the rest of the afternoon. The thought gets him through the rest of the meeting and he loosens his tie the second he steps back out onto the bustling street. His car is waiting for him right out front, like Liz planned, and Zayn thinks for about two seconds before he rounds the side of the vehicle and taps on the driver’s window.

“Can I borrow this car?” he asks.

“I can drive you anywhere,” the driver answers, perplexed. “I signed an NDA.”

Zayn shakes his head. “I’ll give you half a million dollars to lend me your car for the afternoon.”

So the driver slides out of his seat and watches while Zayn rings his bank and has the teller organize the transfer of funds out of his stock options. Money creates money, he remembers his financial advisor saying. For some reason Zayn feels guilty for having so much, like he can’t be ridiculously wealthy and show up on Niall’s front porch with his head ducked. He’s got to get rid of some of it first. He should’ve given the driver millions, to be honest.

Zayn hops up behind the wheel of the Lexus and twists the keys in the ignition. The engine purrs to life and Zayn pulls out into traffic with the quickest of looks over his shoulder. He used to be great at driving terribly when he was young and living in LA, waiting to drop that first album.

Naughty Boy taught him how to drag race – not in person, of course – but he showed him what it was like to take your hands off the wheel and keep your foot planted on the gas pedal and hope to the stars above that everything was going to work in your favor. Zayn appreciates that lesson. Sometimes he just wishes he’d been ready for it.

So for a while, Zayn was music producer by day, street racer by night. And then Louis had had a baby and he couldn’t do it anymore, for some reason.

The drive to Holyhead isn’t as long as Zayn imagines it will be, and then he ditches his car to make it onto the ferry setting off in just ten minutes.

The ship cuts through the water like a butter knife through a block of cheese, which is to say, not very easily. Zayn stuffs his hands in his pockets and fights to calm his breathing. He wanders over to the railing around the deck of the ship and peers down into the churning water. Harry used to watch Titanic in the lounge at the back of the tour bus at least once a week, and if Zayn went along and put his head down in Harry’s lap, Harry used to pet his hair. Zayn thinks of Harry watching the old couple curled up on their steerage bed together with tears rolling down his soft face and smiles. Nostalgia softens everything like the salt his mum used to put on watermelon to make it taste even sweeter.

The ship pulls into harbor at 4:10, and by 4:45, Zayn’s pressing the buzzer outside Niall’s door. He should’ve thought this through better. What if he’s on book tour or the normal kind of tour?

Niall’s neighborhood in Dublin isn’t as posh as Zayn might’ve expected, and he should really warn Niall if he ever sees him about how easy it was for him to scale the gate guarding his driveway. Maybe Niall doesn’t have the kind of people who want to break past his barriers and hurt him, though.

Zayn curls his hand into a fist and presses the buzzer again. Nothing. He turns on his heel and looks out at the street as if he’s just come out of the house. Niall has a collection of plants – Zayn doesn’t know any of their names – lining the edge of his porch, and most of them are in high bloom. The air smells sweet and a gaggle of little boys on bicycles roll past, their laughter spiking into the air like a good strong B flat on the guitar.

No one answers the door, and Zayn’s hungry, so he goes up the road to the nearest pub. It isn’t until he’s taking his snapback off his head and running a hand through his hair that he hears Niall’s distinct laugh, and then his stomach rolls and swoops and stays down, like Zayn trying to do a flip in a swimming pool. Zayn edges a little to his left and spots Niall, his cheeks flushed and his dark hair soft and rumpled, in the middle of some story. He’s still slender and svelte, and when he spreads his skinny arms wide, Zayn feels the same familiar need to rush right into his embrace. He fidgets with his snapback and wonders if Niall would even let him do that.

Niall looks up and Zayn ducks his head, and because he’s a bit of a panicky coward, he slips off to the loo to stare at his own reflection for an unknown period of time and imagine all the possible ways this scenario could go down. Zayn has spent a lot of time doing just this; so much, in fact, that he started doing paintings instead.

They were a series of self-portraits that went over well, even though all the reviews Zayn remembers now said that they were the self-indulgent works of an egomaniac. He was just trying to show the people he loved that he was there, and that he loved them. Like a mirror of his best self he could tote around and present to people so that they’d know he meant to love them and only sometimes got confused, or distracted.

Niall’s waiting for him when Zayn finally comes out of the loo. He has his ankles hooked around the legs of a barstool and his arms folded across his chest. Zayn stares at his spread thighs so that he won’t look at his face, and then he has to look at his face so that he’ll stop ogling him.

“You’re pretty far from home,” Niall says, at length.

“Wanted to see you,” Zayn answers, because now that Niall’s here Zayn’s looking at the mirror himself. He takes two deliberate steps forward and falters, wondering how much closer Niall wants him to be. Zayn wants to slap him down on a flat surface and go over every inch of him with a magnifying glass.

It’s been so long since he’s seen Niall in person, and this very near to him – it’s been years. Years. His voice rumbles low in his chest and the muscles in his forearms flex when he curls his hands tighter around his arms and all Zayn can smell is beer and pub peanuts but he thinks if Niall let him stick his nose right under Niall’s ear like he used to, he’d smell like home. 

Niall drops his open hands into his lap. “It’s quiz night,” he says. “And none of that lot know anything about superhero movies. Help us out, yeah?”

So Zayn does. He’s not like Harry or Niall, he doesn’t instantly feel at home in a group of unfamiliar people, and he’s not always sure what side of himself they want to see. Bradford Bad Boy (almost never)? Famous pop star? Or maybe that quiet, half-forgotten side of him Niall always brings out, the side of him that’s ten years old and dreaming that he’ll develop superpowers one day.

Niall pulls out a chair next to his and ushers Zayn in beside him at his crowded quiz table. Zayn’s shocked to realize he recognizes some of these faces. Laura and Bressie and Deo, looking older now, older than he remembers, and a little wary of him. That’s okay. Zayn would be wary, too. Niall stretches his arm along the back of Zayn’s seat and when the quizzing starts, everything else sort of falls away.

Zayn always understands Louis better in competitive moments like these, whether it’s writing a single or producing it or dropping it and watching it make waves on the charts. Then he remembers what grinding for “What Makes You Beautiful” and “Live While We’re Young” was like and he’s so appreciative of that training, even if it has skewed him, made him feel like he can do anything if he tries hard enough.

Near the end, Niall leans in and asks quietly, “Back to mine?”

He sounds older now and if Zayn looks carefully, he can see tiny creases at the corner of Niall’s eyes and on his cheeks. He’s not old but he’s _older,_ so it’s not fair for Zayn’s heart to get all twisted up in his chest like he’s eighteen and watching a concert with Niall, who leaned in to say the exact same thing. He’ll pull back, his eyes dark and soft, like whatever hotel room they’re sharing with the lights off, and Zayn will say yes. He says yes.

It’s not like it was, though. Niall was always such a hugger and he hasn’t even touched Zayn yet and they’re older now and they both have kids and Zayn has hat hair and he probably smells like ocean and and Niall doesn’t chat easily on the short walk home. He tucks his chin toward his chest and lets Zayn eagerly pick out each new detail of him. His beard is studded with bits of gray, and his glasses are thick and real now.

Niall moves in front of Zayn to unlock his front door and Zayn’s arm must have a mind of its own, because he brushes his fingers across the back of Niall’s neck. Niall stiffens, his shoulder going tense, but he doesn’t move away. He doesn’t move at all. Zayn cups the back of his neck and slides in that much closer. He licks his lips nervously and wonders where to touch him next. He feels a little like he’s playing a game of Operation with his girls and he’s got to get the sick organ out without hitting the side of the game and making everything shake apart.

Niall twists the key and the front door swings inward, and Niall steps through. Zayn, his hand caught in midair like he can hold on to the empty space, blinks, shakes his head, and follows.

He follows Niall to the kitchen, where Niall’s pulling leftovers out of his fridge. “What’ll you have?” he asks, and it’s not _Are you hungry?_ it’s, _You’ve got to eat_ something.

So Zayn selects the Tupperware of smoked salmon and Niall pops it into the microwave for him. He takes a family size bag of chips out of his pantry and opens it in front of Zayn, who eats one to make Niall happy. The salty flavor explodes across his tongue and he realizes, belatedly, that he hasn’t eaten all day. It’s everything Zayn can do not to shove the food in by the handful.

Niall dumps the salmon onto a plate and takes a fork out of a drawer for Zayn, who tears into it right away. Niall settles caddycorner to him at the wooden breakfast table so that their knees brush together. Niall talks to fill the silence, and Zayn can’t believe how much he missed him. The tuft of hair that always sticks out on the right side of his head and the wrinkle in his forehead when he’s doing his announcer voice and even the way he picks at himself.

He tugs on his shirtsleeves and squeezes his earlobe between his thumb and forefinger and he bites his lip between sentences, and all those things used to drive Zayn mad. Now they’re like his own bad habits. They’re old friends that he’s gotten on good terms with in order to get by. They don’t upend his life and he pays due attention to them. He should’ve paid more attention to Niall.

“You look good,” he tunes back into Niall saying. “A little thin, but,” he shrugs, fast and twitchy, a little nervous. “Look like Yaser.”

A flower of warmth blooms in Zayn’s chest. “Yeah?” he beams.

“I was sorry to hear about – I’m sorry for your loss,” Niall mumbles.

Zayn presses his palm over his heart like he can hold onto the heat. “It’s okay,” Zayn says, and means it. Took him a long time to get to this point. “Theo’s doing better?”

Niall raises one eyebrow. “How do you know about Theo’s gammy knees?”

If Zayn could blush, he would be flushed right now. “I, er.”

“Asked Liam,” Niall sighs. “I know. Theo’s good,” he adds helpfully.

“Liam didn’t want to tell me,” Zayn lies awkwardly. “He, er, I twisted his arm.”

Niall laughs out loud. For some reason that’s all the permission Zayn needs to put his hand on Niall’s shoulder and slide his palm down his chest like he’s smoothing the fabric of his shirt. The button-up he’s wearing is thin and Zayn can feel the heat of his skin under his palm, always the strongest just over his heart. Niall stills again, but when Zayn makes to pull his hand away, he makes a soft noise.

“I would sculpt you,” Zayn thinks aloud, squeezing the side of Niall’s ribs.

Niall jumps and laughs, and then Zayn laughs too. “‘S that why you came here? To feel me up?”

“No,” Zayn answers loyally, even though he’d very much like to. He casts his eyes about for something to say that isn’t what he _should_ say, or what he wants to. “It looks nice in here. Decorated all good, and all.”

“Thanks,” Niall says, looking around his house like he can see it fresh and new. His eyes snag on the unexpected clutch of shot glasses in his glass-fronted alcohol hutch. “Harry,” Niall rolls his eyes. “He sends me one from every he stops on tour. Can you believe that maniac? That’s not even half of them, the rest are just too ugly to put out.”

Zayn laughs. He knows that means Niall probably has the rest upstairs in his trophy room, or whatever he calls the room in his house where he files away the band’s continuing past into his collection. “Can I see it?” he asks impulsively. “Your records room, or whatever.”

Niall stills, and then he snorts. “Call it the museum. Sure, why not.”

He makes quick work of putting away the leftover boxes and binning their trash, and then he leads the way upstairs. His stairs are carpeted, and Zayn thinks inanely of asking whether he likes it that way. He thought of doing it for when the girls were very small. Niall’s kids must be, what, grown, probably. Maybe he’s got grandchildren on the brain. Or maybe it’s for Niall, who has to take a break halfway up the steps, his face so neutral that it’s a dead giveaway that he’s in pain.

“Here,” Zayn says, and ducks down.

Niall leans so far back that he almost falls up the stairs. “What!”

Zayn straightens slowly and wonders what the hell is going on with him. He’s not a little kid anymore, Niall’s not his secret not-boyfriend. They’re old men, and he’s supposed to have outgrown this.

“Was gonna pick you up,” he mumbles. “I’m not Harry, I wouldn’t drop you.”

“I don’t need a lift, thanks,” Niall says faintly. Zayn tilts his head and if he squinted, they could be twenty years old and in Amsterdam, Niall almost doubled over in pain ‘cos a fan threw their phone at his knee. They aren’t in Amsterdam, but somehow they’ve ended up right where they started. They’re not married anymore, and Zayn came to Niall out of the blue for reasons even he can’t explain. Zayn still looks at Niall like he wants to be enveloped by him, and Niall still lets him. Time is a flat circle.

Niall’s museum is a carefully curated selection of One Direction’s greatest moments. One Direction hasn’t been together in years and years, but Zayn knows as well as Niall does that the band never really _ends._ They’re all still in it, and of it, like the oak tree growing big and sturdy now in Trisha’s back garden. They were that tree once and they’re its seeds now, or they were. Niall, at least, seems to have grown something beautiful of himself. 

“Why didn’t you write about us?” Zayn asks, puzzling over the Teen Award in his hands. If you look at his CV now it says he’s won about two dozen of these, but all there is on the statue is One Direction in neat block letters. Acorn and tree.

Zayn can only just bring himself to ask, “Were you ashamed of me?” Zayn is something of a human disaster but Niall’s a _good_ guy, and he’s not Harry, he doesn’t want everyone to look and see who loves him like some kind of human credential. He just. He needs to know.

Niall moves in close. He takes the statue out of Zayn’s hand and sets it back on the shelf, the tips of his ears flaming red. “No,” he finally murmurs. “Never, I was never ashamed of you.”

“Then what?” Zayn asks. To his horror, as if he’s seventeen again, his voice cracks right down the middle. “Did you forget?”

“How could I?” Niall mumbles. And it’s not nearly enough, it’s not even really an answer, but Zayn still lunges across the space between them and lands his mouth on Niall’s face. He glances off the corner of his lips so he drags his hand up Niall’s chest and cups the back of his neck to angle his head the way he wants, his tongue licking over Niall’s bottom lip before he kisses him.

Niall inhales sharp, his breath breaking through his nose like an airplane engine starting up, and then he starts kissing Zayn back. They’re almost exactly the same height, and it’s so easy, _so_ easy for Zayn to comb his fingers through the back of Niall’s hair and loop his arm around his narrow waist to keep him close and near without ever breaking the kiss.

“My room’s next one over,” Niall murmurs and then, because he seems distracted with his head tipped back and Zayn’s mouth on his throat, Zayn scoops him up off his feet.

“You fucker,” Niall says, no heat in his voice.

Zayn hefts him in his arms. “You must have glass bones,” he says. “So light.”

“I’m gonna shove my glass foot up your ass if you don’t put me down soon,” Niall says, so Zayn carries him to his room and lets him down slow, mindful of all the gammy bits he knows about.

Niall drops onto the end of the bed, so Zayn climbs into his lap. He wraps his hands gently around Niall’s neck so that he can feel the way his skin is flushed and his pulse is pounding against his throat, and Niall makes a soft, choked sound, his palm sliding under the hem of Zayn’s shirt and flattening against his stomach. Niall pulls Zayn’s ratty t-shirt off over his head.

“Jesus,” Niall says. “Is there an inch of you that _doesn’t_ have a tattoo?”

“Shh,” Zayn says, stroking his head. “You like it.” Niall bends forward and kisses the lip print in the middle of Zayn’s bony, and stubbornly hairless, chest. Actually, he pretends to try and French kiss it, his tongue flicking out against Zayn’s oversensitive skin, which is just rude when Zayn’s sat on his lap waiting patiently for Niall to French kiss _him._

Zayn tucks his knees up around Niall’s waist and Niall stands with him, turning to dump him on the bed. He pauses to take his jeans off first and Zayn watches the smooth lines of one of his oldest and dearest friends. He’s more filled out now, bigger in presence than he ever was before so that the room feels full with just the two of them in it. He kicks his jeans off and his shirt follows next.

Zayn scoots around till his head lands on a pillow, and then Niall crawls up his body. “Old man,” Zayn says fondly, carefully taking the glasses off Niall’s face. He tries them on himself and the prescription isn’t very strong, but once vision starts going, it _keeps_ going.

“Annoying,” Niall comments. “You look better in them than I do.”

“Always true,” Zayn says, even though it isn’t, and then he curls his fingers around Niall’s shoulder and pulls him down. For all his talk, Niall really does like his tattoos, even the ones he hasn’t seen before. He seems to have a certain instinct for which ones are important, though, because he lingers over the leaves Zayn got for each of his kids, and the jacket tattoo he got for his dad. Maybe, somehow, he remembers what they’ll have meant.

Zayn threads his skinny fingers through the hair on Niall’s chest and pulls, and Niall laughs even as his hips instinctively thrust down against Zayn’s. He hasn’t been this worked up this fast since…well, for a long time, and he tries to pull Niall up so that he’s sat on his hardening dick. “We should,” he thinks aloud, “if you want, you should fuck me later. Right now, like, d’you think –”

“So impatient,” Niall murmurs, and then he slips his hand under the waistband of Zayn’s boxer briefs. Zayn stops trying to feel out every inch of Niall’s skin and sets about wriggling out of his pants, murmuring “No, no, don’t stop,” to Niall, who pauses to help. He lays back on the bed and drags his short nails up Niall’s back, laughing when Niall shudders. “See what I do for you,” Niall grumbles, and then he sucks Zayn down.

Zayn closes his eyes and sees stars pinwheeling on the backs of his eyelids and bursts of color like fireworks. “I wouldn’t,” Zayn suddenly can’t stop himself from saying. He never could quite control himself around Niall, though. Always felt too confident, too at ease.

“Wouldn’t what?” Niall asks, popping his bright red mouth off. He loosely jacks Zayn with his fist, his eyes so blue. He doesn’t seem all that happy to be interrupted.

“In the book,” Zayn says thickly. “When you wrote about us being, how we’re once in a life, but what if we could go back. I wouldn’t.” He swallows, and then he makes himself ask, “Would you?”

Niall pushes himself back up till he’s chest to chest with Zayn, who traces Niall’s hairline and then the delicate lines beside his eyes. He knows what he’s really asking, and he knows Niall knows, too, because of how soft his eyes have gone. “No,” Niall says. “I’d live it over and over again if I could.”  

“‘Wonder what’s next,’” Zayn quotes.

Niall, for once, looks perplexed. Zayn can feel the scar on his knee against his own bony knee and it feels so good. So familiar. “Huh?”

“Some show somewhere,” Zayn says. “I intro’ed ‘Little Things’ and all the little phone lights came on, and you remember, it looks like stars. You said, ‘Wonder what’s next.’ I remember.”

“Zayn,” Niall starts, stops.

“I still love you,” Zayn says, because it’s true. It’s always been true, it just hasn’t always been easy. Or ever.

Niall carefully plucks the glasses Zayn forgot he was wearing off the bridge of his nose and sets them aside. Then he leans back down for a kiss. Always been good with his words, Niall. He even knows when _not_ to speak. And it’s not like he needs to, not like it’s anything but what it is, but Zayn pushes at Niall’s shoulder till he falls back and rolls over.

Then Zayn shimmies down the length of his body till he’s grazing his lips over the tip of Niall’s dick like saying hi to an old friend, which just makes Niall gasp on a little laugh. Zayn can tease him later, hopefully, but right now, Niall doesn’t deserve it. Zayn very carefully relaxes his jaw and lets his mind go blank and then he taps Niall’s hip, who starts carefully thrusting into Zayn’s mouth. They were never very good at this, too high on the thrills of the stage and fame and being young and stupid, and truth be told, they’re not that great now. That’s alright. Maybe now there’s time, they can practice.

Even though Niall doesn't say it, Zayn can feel the words in his hands stroking through Zayn's hair and the kisses he presses to his skin like tattoos.  _This_ is what comes next. 


End file.
